more fitted and flattering than it should have
been – the Orthodox equivalent of a teenager
hoicking up a hemline.
Fashion paid for her life outside Monsey;
fashion superpowered her success. The shoe
brand she launched on leaving the community
flourished and morphed into a fashion label
which would have her dressing Kendall
Jenner, supermodel, for the 2017 Met Gala.
Fashion would also serve as a barometer
of Haart’s emergence from fundamentalist
thinking. In 2014, barely a year after leaving
Monsey, she’d visit Milan for business. On the
street between meetings, Haart saw a woman
wearing a pair of leather leggings. Haart- who hadn’t at that point ever worn a pair
of trousers in her life – was entranced. “Pants
are a big deal,” she tells me. “Pants were my
pork.” She followed this woman, stopped her
to ask about the provenance of the leggings,
went directly to the store – Saint Laurent,
it transpired – and tried on a pair. In the
changing room, “I couldn’t stop staring,” she
writes. “My butt looked so nice and perky,
encased in supple leather that felt more
natural than any long, buttoned-to-the-neck
polyester dress from my old life ever had...
They represented everything I was still
afraid to do.” She bought the leggings,
but the business of actually wearing them
presented, she tells me, “the most difficult
moment of my new life”. The first time Haart
left the house in them, “I was drenched in
sweat. Drenched, drenched!”
Because you truly thought God would
smite you down? “I was sure I was going to be
The Times Magazine 39time in my life that I’ve had to fight for my
freedom, and I never failed before. So this is
no different. It’s just, to me, it’s another step in
my journey of when men try to put women
down and take everything that we’ve done to
their own advantage. So this is my life and it’s
not fun, but I have to find a way, again, to grow
and proclaim my freedom. There’s that Chinese
curse, ‘May you have an interesting life.’ ”
I congratulate Haart on the show and
book, both of which I enjoyed. Brazen is more
than just background reading for fans of
My Unorthodox Life. Its first half runs like a
desperate misery memoir; its second, a Judith
Krantz-esque romp through boardrooms and
bedrooms as Haart establishes herself in the
fashion industry. One of the things that strikes
me hardest about Brazen is just how grim her
Monsey life was. In the show, Haart’s past
operates as a strange, drab contrast to the
flash and glam, the short skirts and high heels
of her current existence – like if Dorothy kept
crossing back and forth between Kansas and
Technicolor Oz. Brazen presents it as something
infinitely more painful. “I spent the first 42
years of my life in utter misery,” Haart writes.
She downplayed the extent of that misery
intentionally, she tells me. Haart wanted to
introduce herself to the world as flashy, fun
reality-TV Julia because, “I didn’t want to be
a victim, right? I didn’t want people to feel
sorry for me.” This is not out of pride, she’ll
say, but out of a desire to change the narrative
on what happens to women like her, women
who escape...
Abuse, I suggest. What happened to you
wasn’t just dowdy clothes and an arranged
marriage, was it? It was abuse.
“Not by my husband. My ex-husband is
a lovely person.” To Yosef Hendler’s credit,
in the years after Haart left him and
Monsey, and at considerable cost to
himself, he came to support her decision
wholeheartedly. “I always say there are
no villains in my story, only victims.
Because I have nothing against any
person. It isn’t like, ‘This is a bad guy.’
It’s the laws themselves. This whole
concept of your biology defining your
destiny, and that all women are here
for the same purpose. And all women
are supposed to behave the same way
and do the same thing. That’s what
destroyed me.”
My main intention with our
interview is to get some sense of how
on earth Julia Haart pulled it off.
A survivor of what amounts to a
fundamentalist cult, turned fashion
millionaire, turned reality TV star,
turned author... This is a lot, for one
person’s CV. To my unfeminist shame,
I’d assumed her post-Monsey success
narrative was massaged for tellypurposes. That Haart was a good-looking
fashion dilettante whose marriage to Silvio
Scaglia (a tech entrepreneur and owner of the
La Perla underwear brand at the time Haart
first meets him) was... You know. Convenient.
Having read Brazen, then talked to Haart,
I realise I was wrong. Haart is a hustler, a
born entrepreneur, charismatic enough to
attract investment like a pop ingenue attracts
talent scouts, “a fighter” (her words) and a
woman who loves and understands fashion.
Fashion is incredibly important to her story.
It defined her inability to endure Monsey,
epitomised her losing struggle to stay
tznius (modest, unseen, unexceptional),
and enabled her to escape it.
Where did that love and
understanding of fashion come
from, I ask. Was there an especially
chic grandmother in the picture?
A Chanel-clad aunt?
“I don’t know! My first memory of
[fashion] is in Italy.” When Haart and
her family fled Soviet Russia, they
spent time in a processing centre
in Rome. “I’m three, four years old,
and this little boy gives me my first
Italian leather handbag. I literally
carried that bag [over continents].
I kept that bag until my mid-thirties,
but somewhere it got lost.”
As a teenager, she secretly
collected fashion magazines, then
taught herself to sew using patterns
she herself drew up. For years, she
just about got away with tailoring
her dour, all-cloaking Monsey
uniform so that it was subtlyWith her children, from left, Aron, Miriam, Shlomo and Batsheva
(back row is Batsheva’s husband, Binyamin Weinstein), New York,- Below: Kendall Jenner wearing a Haart design to the Met Gala
She thought God would smite her down for wearing
leather leggings. ‘Belief systems aren’t logical’
GETTY IMAGES Continues on page 51